by dwelling on that old business.”
Dave sipped his coffee. “I haven’t had a look at those files since I’ve been sober. Thought I might have missed something. Besides, some new information has come to my attention.”
Marsilius frowned. “What kind of information?”
“Have you seen the news reports about that murdered Tulane student?”
“It was all over the news a few weeks back, but what’s that got to do with Renee Savaria?”
“They both worked at a strip joint on Bourbon Street called the Gold Medallion. The owner’s a greaser named JoJo Barone. He goes all the way back to your old vice squad days. You wouldn’t happen to remember anything about him, would you?”
“Nothing more than what I told you seven years ago.”
“I wasn’t exactly thinking clearly seven years ago. Refresh my memory.”
Marsilius shifted his weight to accommodate his knee as he looked out over the bayou. Dave followed his gaze, and for a moment they both seemed to get caught up in the sway of the Spanish moss that fell, like an old woman’s knotted hair, from the water oaks in the yard. The motion was hypnotic in the silent heat. Then another heron took flight from the marsh, breaking the spell, and Dave watched until it was out of sight before turning back to his uncle.
“Well?”
“All I remember is that JoJo had a lot of irons in the fire back then. Besides the skin club in the Quarter, he ran a couple of massage parlors out on Chef Menteur Highway. Had a bunch of Haitian drug dealers for clients, low- life badasses that used to necklace Aristide’s political opponents back in the early nineties. Bastards like that have antifreeze in their veins. I saw one of ’embite the head off a chicken one night and drink the blood like it was pop.”
“Did you ever bust JoJo?”
“We ran him in two or three times, but he had the juice on some pretty high-up officials back then. They always got a little nervous whenever JoJo was in custody, so the charges had a way of disappearing.”
“Did you ever spend any off-duty time at his establishments?”
Marsilius’s features tightened as if Dave might have hit a sore spot. “Chef Menteur Highway was always a place where a guy could get into trouble pretty damn fast. I never went out there unless I had to. And anyway, JoJo didn’t hire the usual crack whores you saw hanging out in the Quarter. His girls were quality and they didn’t come cheap. Where would a cop get that kind of coin?”
Dave laughed.
Marsilius didn’t. He was like a lot of cops Dave had known over the years. He hadn’t been above taking a little something under the table now and then in exchange for muscle or protection, but he didn’t like getting called on it. “Where you going with this, Dave?”
“Maybe nowhere. But now that I’ve got a clear head, I’m starting to remember some things.”
“Like what?”
Like a diary entry with initials and an address on Chef Menteur Highway, Dave thought.
The discovery of Renee Savaria’s diary was the first break he’d had in her case for weeks, and it had come seemingly out of the blue when her roommate called him at the station and asked to meet at a bar on Magazine Street. She was a dancer at the Gold Medallion, too, but that day she’d traded her G-string and pasties for dark glasses and a black head scarf. She’d sat huddled in the back booth of the bar, fear dripping from every pore as she sipped a whiskey sour and chain-smoked Lucky Strikes.
She’d never told Dave how she came to be in possession of the dead woman’s diary, but she did nervously confess that someone had ransacked her apartment looking for it. And she was getting the hell out of New Orleans before they came after her. She’d claimed she didn’t know anything about Renee’s murder, but she was convinced that whoever tore her place up looking for the diary was someone who would kill to get his hands on it.
She’d turned the diary over to Dave that day and he’d never heard from her again. He’d been in the tedious process of sifting through the entries when Ruby had gone missing. Two days later, he’d gotten the first phone call.
“If you want your daughter back alive, you better listen carefully to what I have to say.”
Even at the memory, Dave’s chest tightened painfully, and he had to wonder if Marsilius was right. Maybe he wasn’t doing himself any favors by dragging up a seven-year-old homicide. But now that he was sober, he was starting to remember a lot of other things. Like the helpless rage that had engulfed him when he’d realized that his daughter’s disappearance had nothing to do with Renee’s death. The crimes were connected only by Dave’s gullibility. While he’d been played by Renee Savaria’s killer, Ruby’s abductor had gotten clean away.
The pain in his chest intensified, and he absently rubbed his hand up and down his arm as he watched a pelican dive-bomb the surface of the water, rising a moment later with a sliver of glistening silver in its beak. Dave felt a little like that flapping mullet. Hopelessly trapped by the things he’d done in his past.
Beside him, Marsilius waited for a response, but Dave wasn’t sure how much he wanted to tell him. Not that he didn’t trust his uncle; he did. But if the calls Dave had already made generated some heat, he didn’t want anyone else caught in the middle.
“Those murders were seven years apart,” Marsilius finally said. “JoJo may not have the connections he once did…hell, no one does since Katrina. But you’ll need more than that to go after him.”
“Maybe I’m not after JoJo.”
His uncle looked glummer by the moment. “Who you after, Dave?”
“Right now I’m just asking a few questions.”
“Why?”
“It’s what I do for a living, remember?”
“For a paying client, maybe, but not just for the hell of stirring things up. Why complicate your life? You’ve got things good these days. You don’t need NOPD breathing down your neck.”
“Who says they will be?”
“What, you think they’re going to be happy to see you back in town? You were a mean drunk, Dave, and you burned a lot of bridges. Everyone understood what you were going through so they were willing to cut you some slack up to a point. But let’s face it, you didn’t exactly leave behind a pile of goodwill when you cleaned out your desk. You start nosing around in an active investigation, somebody might use that as an excuse to mop up the floor with your ass.”
“By somebody, you mean Alex Girard.”
Marsilius set his cup on the porch and straightened slowly. “There’s a lot of bad blood between you two, and he’s got the upper hand these days. Like I said, Katrina changed things in New Orleans. Most of the old alliances were swept away in the floodwaters, and the way I hear it, he’s been cozying up to some of the new power brokers in town. He’s got ambition and he’s got muscle. That makes him a dangerous man in my book. You get crossways with him again, you could end up losing your P.I. license. Then where will you be?”
Dave grinned. “Maybe I’ll buy myself a boat and give you a run for your money, old man.”
Marsilius wasn’t the least bit amused. “You watch your back, boy, you hear me? You keep asking questions, you might find out the hard way there’s a hollow point out there somewhere with your name on it.”
Nine
The sun was already blazing when Claire took a cab into the Quarter. She’d been sleeping when her mother had left the hospital. Claire had awakened to find a note from Lucille propped against a cup of water on the bedside table.
Claire had waited until the aide who’d brought her breakfast came in to clear away the tray, and then she’d climbed out of bed, dressed and left the room. She’d used her cell phone to call a cab, then waited in the air-
